PiDiCNC Control System

Again, i love the form factor and the simplicity of the PIDICNC, for all intents and purposes it is perfect. On the other hand there is the fact that it uses RPI3, thta in itself is OK, but for something that is used by milions of people every day, RPI3 proved to be quite messy. The good thing is it uses Linux so most things apply to it also. Machinekit is derived from Linuxcnc, and while it takes half an hour to setup and install and have a machine working with Linuxcnc, it is a different story with machinekit. There is a ready made image of machinekit that works but outdated, so having to install from scratch on an SD card takes a lot of time. In the end after a week of tinkering, just did a dist update and switched to software rendering, as everything else went from mildly discomforting to monumentaly failing, that did the trick nicely, and RPI3 went from barely usable to quite enjoyable to work with.
As for responce time, it has improved by a large margin and it is very usable with over 4MB gcode files.

Can you make some short video of screen rendering with big gcode? I wonder how it looks.

I agree, it isn't easy to install machinekit setup, but at the time when we made a decision to use RasPi as main computer we hoped that linuxcnc community will start support RasPi boards soon, like many much more bigger and commercial companies.

Pidicnc boards are not boards only for Linuxcnc. These boards are intended for universal use, everything what runs on arm platform and you can control SPI from it is suitable to works with pidicnc boards.

I have found some other intresting uses e.g. for academic use, Matlab have official support for RasPi and there is a possibility to run models directly on RasPi at real time and control the boards. I made some simple tests with motors and it looks that it works nice.
Other interesting thing, Codesys have also support for RasPi, I made a beta driver for test. It works nice, it have a web HMI.
Short video:

I hope the linuxcnc community will start support arm SBC soon. This computers have an SPI interface for what is much more easier build some hobby controller boards than for peripheries what is available on common x86 motherboards.

viktan wrote: I hope the linuxcnc community will start support arm SBC soon. This computers have an SPI interface for what is much more easier build some hobby controller boards than for peripheries what is available on common x86 motherboards.

LinuxCNC is built and tested on ARM but AFAIK only on armhf.
You can see all the platforms that the buildbot test-compiles for here:
buildbot.linuxcnc.org/buildbot/waterfall
If using Jessie, there are even packages: buildbot.linuxcnc.org/dists/jessie/maste...reempt/binary-armhf/

Hi,
Tom, can you please share the configuration file you used for the pidiCNC?

Here you go.

Thank you!!
where did you install pidi from? is it open source?